The powerful psychedelic DMT has become world famous in the last couple of decades – both in its pure state and via its inclusion in the shamanic South American brew ayahuasca – through the likes of Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman. But DMT’s hallucinogenic properties were only realised (by Westerners) around 70 years ago, when, in 1956, Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szara extracted DMT from the Mimosa hostilis plant and injected himself with the extract.

Although ayahuasca use had been documented by Westerners since the mid-19th century, the exact sources of its mind-altering properties had been the subject of debate for more than a century by the mid-1950s; the frustration was evident in the comments of the famous ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, “Here we are still standing on the threshold with one hand on the knob of a door just set ajar, not yet opened.”

It wasn’t until 1966 that the breakthrough was officially made. As DMT researcher Andrew Gallimore notes in a recent essay on LitHub:

That door was finally kicked off its hinges when ethnobotanist Homer Pinkley, a graduate student of Richard Schultes, arrived in the small village of Dureno, Ecuador—home of the Kofan people and some of the greatest ayahuasca artists in South America… During his work with the Kofan, Pinkley also caught wind of an additional plant added along with the caapi vine that allowed drinkers of the decoction to see beings known as oprito, meaning “small heavenly people.” A plant that allowed you to see little people — surely this must have been a clue?

One evening in the spring of 1966, following the death of a tribal chief, a group of around twenty Kofan men and boys gathered in the ceremonial house to perform an ayahuasca ceremony. Pinkley was permitted to join them. The following morning, hoping to uncover evidence of this secret admixture plant, he fished around in the empty cauldron used to prepare the brew.

He was in luck: A few leaves and seeds somehow managed to escape the hours of ferocious boiling intact—just about sufficient to make a formal identification. Latin name: Psychotria viridis, more commonly known as chacruna, but known to the Kofan as oprito — the same name given to the small heavenly people whom these magical leaves made visible.

When samples of Psychotria viridis were shipped to America for analysis, it was found to have only one major psychedelic component: DMT.

But while Homer Pinkley is the one usually given the credit for identifying the plant as the crucial ingredient in the shamanic brew, it turns out that another person may have (partly) discovered it already, some 12 years previously: the American writer William Burroughs.

After shooting and killing his wife in Mexico City in 1951, supposedly in a William Tell-gone-wrong accident, Burroughs fled and traveled through South America for several months, seeking out a shamanic concoction that was said to give the user telepathic abilities: yagé (another name for ayahuasca).

As Gallimore notes: “When William Burroughs was let into the ‘trade secret’ by the medicine man Saboya in Pucallpa, Peru, on returning to Mexico City in 1954, he wrote to Richard Schultes to announce his discovery, enclosing a few of the leaves he’d pocketed”:

Dear Dick, I enclose sample of leaves used in preparation of Yage – Ayauska there – by Peru Indians. They boil the macerated vine with a large portion of these leaves for two hours. Yagé prepared in this way is a great deal more powerful and quite different in effect from yagé prepared in the same manner alone or from a cold infusion.

But to Burroughs’s disappointment, Schultes never replied. Did he perform an analysis, but as the psychedelic properties of DMT were not discovered until 2 years later by Szara, wasn’t able to identify the crucial alkaloid? In any case, it wasn’t until his student Homer Pinkley’s discovery of chacruna more than a decade later that Schultes seems to have thought to analyse the leaves that Burroughs sent to see if they were the same psychedelic source.

The analysis was clear: The plant that Burroughs had collected the leaves of was indeed the DMT-containing jungle plant Psychotria veridis.

You can learn more about the strange history and effects of DMT in Andrew Gallimore’s book, Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug.